Cakewalk Guitar Tracks Pro Version 3

Cakewalk, a name well known in the PC-based studio industry, has just released it's latest offering, Guitar Tracks Pro 3. Cakewalk has a wide range of products reaching everyone from the casual home hobbyist to the professional studio, and everyone in between. Guitar Tracks Pro 3 falls in the middle of the pack. A very full featured application limited to 32 tracks, which is more than enough for many, and sports a price of $209 for the full version and upgrade prices of $79 for former Guitar Tracks Pro users or $99 for registered users of other Cakewalk products.

Version 3 is a substantial move forward for the Guitar Tracks series. There are many great new features and features that I feel deserve some attention whether they are new or not. Some of the most notable features are:

• ASIO and WDM driver support
• New audio engine based on the same technology used in Sonar 3
• Full support of Acid loops
• Use effects on input while recording
• Comes bundled with AmpliTube LE amp simulator, GT:FX effects suite and the Cakewalk VST adapter
• Supports VST and DirectX effects
• Support for various control surfaces for a more hand on mixing experience
• 8 Subgroups and 2 auxiliary bus routing options
• Unlimited undo/redo

System Requirements

The requirements to run Guitar Tracks is relatively modest compared to many applications out there today. Cakewalk states that the minimum requirement is an 800MHz processor, 128MB Ram 1024x768 display resolution at 16-bit. The sound device can be any Windows compatible component for audio and MIDI. The recommended requirement is a 1.2GHz or higher CPU, 512MB Ram, 7200RPM UltraDMA or SCSI hard drives, 24-bit resolution screen at 1024x768 and a WDM or ASIO compatible audio device. Guitar Tracks will work with Windows 2000 or Windows XP. XP is the recommended operating system.

Basically what this says is that any PC that was built in the last 2 or 3 years will run this program. I personally would not recommend running any multitracking audio application with less than a 1GHz CPU and 256MB Ram, 512MB if you have the means. real-time processing can chew up CPU processing power and RAM really fast. That said, in any situation, the bigger the PC, the better the performance, the more tracks you can record, the more plugins you can run and the more pleasant the overall experience will be.

Installation, Configuration and the First Launch

Guitar Tracks Pro 3 installs via a Flash-based install wizard, as Cakewalk now does with any product I have seen. The install is nice and easy, it installs the core application, the GT:FX plugin pack, AmpliTube and the VST Adapter all with the click of a single button. I wish they did this with Sonar as well, with Sonar I have to go through a half-dozen or so installs to get everything installed that I wanted, and this true for the older Pro Audio series as well. It made it quick and easy to get up and running. I am glad to see Cakewalk take such a direction.

On first launching the application it looks for and scans all you audio hardware to determine it's capabilities and to index exactly how many input and outputs your have to work with, what component they are coming from, what driver types are available for each and how well they perform under each available driver type. If you have more than one sound card, this may take a minute or two.

Once started, you will notice that, as they have done with Sonar, Guitar Tracks Pro 3 has a very fresh, new and classy interface. All the global controls such as the transport controls, view toggles, current song information, current disk space, CPU usage and the like, are all in the top 150 or so pixels of the screen in a nice and readable layout, an example of this is displayed above. On the left side of it are the view toggles with buttons to go from mixer view (which is default) to track view. And a third button to turn on and off the navigator pane at the very bottom of the screen, this pane gives a total view of the song and shows you what area of the song you are currently viewing or working in. Additionally, there are buttons in this top section to go from viewing tracks 1-16, tracks 17-32, the busses or a scrollable view of them all. Along with these are a bunch of other buttons to control the metronome, markers, looping, punching and other such functions. The image below is a good look at the top control panel.

Under the "options" menu in the menu bar you will find all the MIDI and audio device configuration, which is identical to Cakewalk's flagship product, Sonar. Easy to use and to get a good picture of how well your sound card performs. This application now supports the high-performance, low latency ASIO driver type which most any application that wants to be taken seriously in the industry now supports, it's great to see Guitar Tracks Pro 3 do it as well.

The only thing about their configuration that I find unusual is that if you want to use ASIO, and who wouldn't if you have it, is that you will have to do some configuration. The application will default to WDM drivers if it sees them, even if it sees ASIO as well. If it doesn't see either it will set up as an MME driver. Therefore, to use ASIO you need to click through Options > Audio > Advanced then select ASIO from the driver type drop down menu. The application will ask you to restart the program to use the new driver type, it will then rescan your hardware and start back up using that new type.

That said, as with any Cakewalk product, it does configure itself pretty well on the first startup by running it's "Wave Profiler" on your sound device(s). The buffering and latency are set up as optimially for your sound card as possible generally. The fact it does not default to ASIO if available is just kind of annoying.

Recording and Editing With Audio

Guitar Tracks Pro 3 has very powerful editing, processing and mixing tools. Enabling and recording tracks is very straight forward.

To start a new project simply open the application and click File > New in the menubar. From there the mixer will appear. Click the button to view the track view and you will have 32 tracks, 8 aux busses and a main out sitting there waiting for you. Right-click on the track anywhere in the left pane of the track view and select "Track Properties" from the menu (it's at the bottom). In the resulting dialog you select the input that track should record from, and the output or aux bus the audio should route to. There is also an options field for notes about the track as well. Double-clicking the "Track 1", "Track 2", etc, will empty the track name field and allow you to name the track whatever you wish as well...setting the track up is just that easy, meer seconds. Next, you see four buttons next to each track name. "M" (mute), "S" (solo), "R" (record) and ".))" (input monitor). Highlight the record button to arm the track, press the record button and you are recording.

In the upper toolbar you have controls for the metronome available to you. There you set the BPM of your project, toggle the metronome during recording and/or playback, and whether or not to accent the first beat of each measure. There is also a button to get to further metronome options such as which MIDI sound to use as the normal beat and accent beat, how load to play it, timecode option, MIDI sync options and other metronome related functionality.

On the right side of the upper control panel are the controls for handling looping and punching functions. Looping is very easy, in the text boxes at the top, just enter the starting measure and beat, then the ending measure and beat and boom, you're looping. Very handy the practice a single part a few times before commiting to recording it. I have noticed, as with Sonar, that looping does occassional cause dropouts, then playback stops, but it's frequent or predictable. Punching is set up the same way. If you mess up one phrase of an otherwise wonderful take, set the punch in at the beginnging of the phrase and the punch out at the end of the phrase. An additional option available in punching is whether to overwrite the old take, add your new take to the old or "auto punch" which is what will normally be used. Rewind a few measures before the phrase to be punched, start playing along and it will automatically start record at the punch in and stop recording at the punch out. Saves a bunch of time and energy over redoing the whole take.

After all the tracks are recorded you can start moving, copying and pasting your audio at will. Guitar Tracks Pro 3 offering a very complete set of tools to make editing pretty quick and easy. All the buttons just above the left pane of track view are the editing features. From there you select the tools to split tracks to select and move pieces of them. There are very accurate and useful snap functions to allow you to easily split right on the measure or beat the first time. There are also buttons to enable and work with envelopes, displaying meters in your track properties and how to display them, zooming on your audio and more.

If you have never edited audio before, as with any application, it will take some gettingused to working with all the features. However, Guitar Tracks Pro 3 does have the tools very logically layed out and I was able to get up to speed working with them almost immediately having never worked with this specific application before. I really am impressed with how nicely it is all layed out.

Working with Loops
By Noize2u

Guitar Tracks Pro 3 has an integrated loop explorer that allows you to browse your collection of loops and preview each loop before dragging it in to your project. Give a listen to the 100's of megabytes of loops that come bundled on the CD-Rom with the application, compliments of Smart Loops, and find the loops that best suits your project. Drag and drop the loop into your project. These loops will automatically change themselves to follow the pitch and tempo of your current project. If you use looping in your projects, you will appreciate the features found in the application.

Calkwalk refers to their loops and looping features as "groove clips". Guitar Tracks Pro 3 has full support for Groove Clips, plus, the Acid Loops format is supported, which puts gigabytes and gigabytes of loops available to you from Acid Loop CD's or any of the dozens of loops web sites all over the internet. Acid Loops are easily the most commonly supported and used loop standard in the industry, there are many user web sites that freely trade loops or sell loops for decent prices.

Aside from using the groove clips and loops supplied with Guitar Tracks Pro 3 you can also convert any wave file into a groove clip or loop enabled clip. The only thing you need to do is make sure it matches the tempo of the track when you drag it in or create it by recording it into Guitar Tracks Pro 3. From there on out after you have enabled it to loop it will follow project tempo changes. You can also create them to follow project pitch changes as well by telling Guitar Tracks Pro 3 the original referance note of the riff you want to convert to looping.

If you already have a drum loop or riff you want to use in Guitar Tracks Pro 3, simply drag it into the project and drop it in the track you wish to use it, enable looping and your off. I even went so far as to try importing mp3 bits into Guitar Tracks Pro 3 and slice them up to convert into loops and they worked out just fine. You must know the tempo to get away with these tactics though. But it really leaves you with a very wide palette of things to work with. And again this is something that will allow you to find thousands of sounds to use from all over the internet, or sampled from whatever source you see fit to use.

Groove clips can be created from any small snippet of audio, or any single piece of a large audio file. Just select and copy any section of any audio snapped at measures and copy it into an open track. From there it's only a simple right-click on the clip in track view and select the "groove-clip looping" and you have a groove clip.

Once you've enabled the looping you simply grab the end of the loop and drag out as many repetitions as you need. Simple but effective for those in a time crunch and in need of making quick work of laying out a drum track or bass line or whatever backing tracks you may need. I layed several guitar riffs down and simply enabled them to follow project pitch and quickly dropped in markers to change the progresions pitch to suit the need.

And even with the looped tracks you can still use the automation features available in all tracks. This feature is worth its weight in gold for the time an energy it will save those who need to create on the fly and dont have time to wait for a drummer or bass player to show up.

Mixing Down

OK, so everything is recorded and edited. You are now ready to mix it down. Great, Guitar Tracks Pro 3 won't let you down, just click the mix view button in the upper left of the control panel and take a look. Each channel strip has all the options you need to process and mix each track. Starting at the top is the name of the track, followed by the assigned input and the trim. After that is the effects window. Right-clicking in that window is how you add effects to the track. Beneath that each channel has to aux sends available as pres or post sends, then the mute, solo, record and input monitoring toggles, the panning, the volume fader and at the bottom is the selected output bus. The output busses also have all these features, minus, of course, the sends.

As you can see, this is set up very much like a real hardware mixer, which makes it more comfortable to work with for people that are more familiar with that environment.

Mixing is so much more than simply setting all the volumes to the right levels, and Guitar Tracks Pro 3 has the tools you need. Along with the Guitar Tracks Pro 3 you also get a couple of very power software packages bundled along for the ride.

AmpliTube

One cool piece of bundled software is a special edition of AmpliTube, from IK Multimedia, which is a guitar amp simulator and effects plugin. This special eddition comes with three amp simulations, three cabinet simulations and some additional elements which include wah-wah, delay, overdrive, EQ, presence and a spring reverb effects. I found this plugin to be a lot of fun. It works very easily and sounds great. I never got much use from the distortion, as I didn't like the sound that much, but distortion is one effect that is very hard to pull of in software. Other than that it is a very powerful, functional, fun and very attractive piece of software. Up to 128 presets can be used that can be called via MIDI. These presets include any combination of the previously mentioned amps, cabinets and effects.

The presets themselves are not bad, all very nice, very usable, but, as with any software of this type, any home studio geek is going to want to kick back and start tweaking. Being a very attractive and easy to use interface that is quite fun to play with so tweaking won't seem like such a chore, but more of a little adventure.

GT:FX

The other bundled package is the GT:FX suite of plugins. The GT:FX suite is a nice package of very useful plugins for many situations. The suite includes:

• Phaze, which creates swirling vintage effects or add a modern edge to your sound
• Squeeze, compressor to help manage your signal strength
• Verb, a nice reverb effect that uses the acclaimed Sonitus:fx technology
• Modulate brings your sound to life with an array of Chorus and Flange effects
• Echo for echo and delay type effects
• Q, a multi-band parametric EQ

All of the plugins have a very consistent interface across them which makes them quite easy to use. The effects themselves are very nice. The parametric EQ in particular was something I really liked. I use parametrics a lot, and I was very impressed with this one. Also, typically, you really need to spend a lot of money to get a decent software reverb plugin. The "Verb" bundled with GT:FX, while obviously not being the best in the business, is a very usable reverb with some very nice textures and not the incredibly high CPU usage that many bundled effects have.

It Doesn't Stop There

Together these packages give you a lot of processing power to get your sound just the way you want it. But that isn't all, don't forget that Guitar Tracks Pro 3 also fully supports all third-party DirectX and VST plugins so you can use any plugins in those formats that you wish in addition to the great bundled packages.

Guitar Tracks Pro 3 also offers support for many current control surfaces as well. So if you would rather work with real knobs and faders instead of a mouse, it's OK, Guitar Tracks Pro 3 will let you. Not having a control surface at my disposal, I was unable to test this feature personally.

Guitar Tracks Pro 3 also offers SMPTE/MTC syncing capabilities to sync itself up with hard disc recorders and other devices that support this type of standard syncing. This is cool for being able to import external projects into your PC for misdown and to take advantage of the great effects and mixing capabilities in the app.

After mixdown, Guitar Tracks Pro 3 offers a few exporting options for the final stereo mix. It can be exported to a simple stereo wave file, a RealMedia file, Windows Media or mp3. Which ever you choose, after entering the filename you want it saved as and the bit and sample rates, you will be presented with a dialog box asking for the details of how you wish the file to be encoded. The export features are complete and offer as nice of results as the chosen format is capable of.

Summin' It Up

All-in-all we find that Guitar Tracks Pro 3 stack up favorably in the market space. it holds up to Cakewalk standards of being functional, easy to learn and use and feature filled. While even minimal MIDI tracking functionality would be a welcomed addition, as to any multitracking application, for the purpose of this program, that being guitar tracking, this is a powerful program. $209 MSRP seems a little bit steep at first glance, but then consider the VST adapter, a special addition of AmpliTube and the GT:FX suite of plugins come bundled with it, the price seems a bit more reasonable.

What Rocks:

• Very nice user interface improvements
• The bundled software is a very nice addition
• Easy to learn and logically layed out
• Very quick and easy groove clips implementation

What Doesn't

• Price might be a steep for some
• Even a single MIDI track for sequencing a drum beat would be nice